Perhaps there is yet more to come that no one expects
Are we headed into a political abyss? Or are we already there? Ironically enough, this topic was the center of discussion between my friends and me, just hours before we heard the news of Imran Khan’s arrest. Just hours before the country was plunged into a madness no one could have foreseen. Perhaps it was too soon.
There were no expectations, good or bad, for May 9th. It started out as very simply just another day in a barrage of days that held no particular distinguishing importance. And it was supposed to go the same way. I would attend classes at my university in the morning, get home in the afternoon, work on my assignments, possibly go out with my family in the evening, and eventually fall asleep to repeat the comfortable cycle of existence.
As one may now expect, in hindsight, that is not what happened.
We were in university when the news arrived through a bombardment of distressing phone calls from our equally distressed mothers at nearly the same time. We were informed of what had just occurred – the former prime minister of Pakistan had just been arrested. We were told we needed to come back home immediately.
Looking back, I find it funny that my first thought was that I didn’t want to miss my last lecture by going home early over a single person’s arrest. Clearly, the gravity and urgency of the situation – and what the situation entailed – had not settled in yet.
No, it settled in when I left early nonetheless, and sitting in the bus, scrolling through social media for news on the situation, saw the beginning of the fires that would very, very soon consume the entire country.
The news of the road blockades started to come in moments after I arrived home. The low-quality videos of the rioting and shelling, soon after. In half a day following the arrest of Imran, the sheer amount of damages that our country saw at the hands of his supporters was already too much.
I remember thinking to myself that I would never understand this kind of mob mentality seemingly being brashly displayed by the hundreds of thousands of people actively engaging in violence and arson and blasting.
I could not sleep at all that night. My friends that lived near and downwind of the areas where the rioting was focused were choking on smoke and tear gas, and I was choking on concern. Needless to say, spending the night staying up and scrolling through the captured videos of the tussle between the deployed army soldiers and the rioters, of people being shot at and arrested, of fires consuming buildings, of houses being broken into, and of vehicles being destroyed did me little good.
What shook me harder than anything else though, was getting to know that May 9th was now being called “Black Day”, due thanks to the tragic losses suffered by the country at the hand of Imran’s supporters, following his arrest. Due thanks to the political infighting and instability that has settled over our nation like a hailstorm just waiting to happen.
It made me mad. The last time the term “Black Day” was used, it was to memorialize the gut-wrenching terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar in 2014, where countless lives of innocent children were unjustly and revoltingly cut short, their dreams and ambitions laid to waste. And now, 9 years later, it is being used because we as a nation decided to cut off our own foot by swinging our own axe down on it.
Not two full weeks have passed since the day, and the country has suffered billions in damages alone, and billions more in losses. Lives have been lost, homes have been destroyed, industries have suffered, the economy is somehow in an even greater state of shambles than it was before, educational campuses and hospitals have suffered, army memorials have been disrespected, and the remaining intermittent roadblocks are still disrupting traffic in many places.
Was it worth it, I wonder? For us common folk to destroy things and ruin lives in the name of having our voices heard? And that too, all for the sake of a power struggle between kings in a game of chess that is perhaps too grand for us pawns to ever hope to understand. To divide the nation and setting it alight both literally and metaphorically, rather than coming together to work out the issues we face in a civil and constructive way?
Perhaps we will never know. And perhaps there is yet more to come that no one expects. The biggest question remaining on my mind now is… Are we headed into political abyss? Or are we already there?
